Unpayable Debt

Denise Ferreira da Silva is director and professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) and a 2019 Wall Scholar. Her academic and artistic works address the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and A Divida Impagavel (2019), and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013). Her artistic work includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people.

Unpayable Debt examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital. It is inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, it exposes how the colonial, the racial, and capital constitute the political (juridical, ethical, and symbolic) architecture of the global present, where raciality—a referent of coloniality—justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction.